home
|
about
|
news
|
contents
|
gossip
|
photographs
|
venues
|
brighton
|
dublin
|
edinburgh
|
film
|
features
|
interviews
|
awards
|
fashion
|
recipes
|
no more drinks
|
newsletter
|
links
|
contact
Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
NATALIE HAYNES
in
SIX DEGREES OF DESOLATION
Verdict: Powerful and charismatic
Edinburgh - Pleasance - August 02
It's Natalie Haynes's last night at Edinburgh and she's not wearing dark glasses. She explains the shades in her publicity photo. She's come across a weird collector of her flyers: 'Someone older than my dad is wanking over my poster'.
Haynes is elegant in orange T-shirt and long black skirt, pretty, and 27. Six Degrees of Desolation? Come off it. No, she insists, and launches into Number 1 - Phobias. She confesses to being neurotic. And she has a phobia of chivalrous men. And spiders. Ones with 4 legs: it's an eternal debate: 'Kill the bastards'. These are spiders that 'exceed your Hoover diameter', it's full-scale war.
Haynes is onto the 2nd Degree of Desolation and admits to vegetarianism with leather shoes. In passing she disparages Tom and Jerry - a real live cat simply wouldn't behave like that. It leads to a very funny passage about aerosol rape alarms: but what if she's attacked by a deaf rapist?
Her last house belonged to the then boyfriend ('like the cunt he was') which brings her to Degree 3: Heartbreak. She met this boy last Festival ('He is good'), nothing daunted, ('I'm mental'), he knew the film Shallow Grave, and Haynes goes off into a funny section about it. Ultimately is the boy in question going to receive a dead pigeon in a box? Tim Sebastian comes into this, via late-night watching of BBC, people on rolling news ('at least they won't leave me') and 'Death with Dignity'.
Alan Turing takes a suicidal bite out of his cyanide-laced apple, as Haynes reviews the Bletchley Park Enigma-crackers complete with Bombes. She recommends Andrew Hodges's 'Alan Turing: the Enigma' for further reading, and bounds on to Desolation 4: Hounding of People / Categorising of People.
'Mercy fuck' aren't the two opening words that would necessarily come to mind, but it turns out to be a story about ginger folk. Tonight, at least, Haynes has dark gingery hair. She recalls a show in Balham last year and a table of 12 boys, where 11 had sponsored the 12th to shag a ginger one for Comic Relief. A man in the audience at a gig took exception to ginger references, and there was nearly a fight, she says, which leads to the 5th Desolation: Death.
The end of her career at a Manchester club came when she accidentally told manager Dave Perkin she was glad his mother was dead. It wasn't meant to come out like that, and here she tells the story. It was the day David Beckham had his head shaved.
Degree 6 is Under-Employment: 'When you end up in a less good job than you meant to'. Haynes quickly identifies all the other ex- and present teachers in the room. She taught in a secondary school but lost the job because she was sleeping with one of the 6th-formers: she was 22 and he was 18. It was a boys' boarding school, and 'sleeping with a teenager was the only perk of the job. They've outlawed that - now there are none'.
Haynes remembers Spaccy Seymour and ploughs deeply into a long section on Joey Deacon, Blue Peter's token disabled man for the 1981 International Year of The Disabled. She identifies those aged 25-40 as The Joey Generation. He had cerebral palsy. So, of course does the gifted comedian and adorable Francesca Martinez, whose show 'I'mperfect' is playing the Fringe. Perhaps because of that context - or perhaps because it's not at the same clever level of writing as the rest of the set - it's the one part of Haynes's fine show that bounces slightly off the rails.
Haynes works at high energy. There's a level of aggression or nervousness in her set that's exciting: the feeling that it might not fully come off, which can be part of the essence of great comedy.
Six Degrees of Desolation is a superbly-constructed show, well-written - at times touching genius. It's delivered by a powerful and charismatic performer.
END
John Park
reviewed Monday 26 August 02 / Pleasance Below
related topic - Francesca Martinez - I'mperfect
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
